This week,
I’m thrilled to speak with Dr. Megan Ranney, a leading researcher and advocate on the intersection between
digital health and violence prevention and Associate Professor at Brown
University. We speak about her achievements in research and violence
prevention, and how her gender has affected her career.

M Lin: Tell me a little bit about where
you are currently in your career, and how it was that you came to be here.

M Ranney: I am an associate professor at Brown.
I’ve been at Brown since I was an intern, so for about 15 years. My focus is on
using technology to prevent violence, particularly gun violence, and related
sequela like mental health and substance use.

M Ranney: I made my way to where I am now, other
than the fact that I had stayed at the same physical location for the last 15
years, I’ve had a little bit of a wavy path. I always knew that I wanted to do
public health, but wasn’t sure in what capacity. I actually came to emergency
medicine in order to do global health, because I did Peace Corps before med
school. Very quickly during residency I realized that global health was not
going to work for me and my family, and did this period of a couple of years of
being like, should I do ultrasound, or critical care? Trying to figure out what
the right fit was.

M Ranney: I landed on a fellowship in injury
prevention, given that a third of ED visits are injuries. Huge global burden to
injuries, so I figured that I could someday go back overseas and work globally.
And it’s closely linked to many of the things that I care most about in our
vulnerable populations.

M Ranney: So I chose to stay at Brown for the
injury prevention fellowship, and then from there, have just, sometimes
intentionally, sometimes less so, made my way through various career
development grants, both from SAEM and then from NIH, and have created a career
for myself using research to try to transform the care of our most vulnerable
populations.

M Lin: Tell me how you first got
involved with AWAEM.

M Ranney: Gosh, I first got involved with AWAEM,
it had to have been when it first started, 10 years ago. I remember sitting in
a room with it would’ve been Gail D’Onofrio and Michelle Biros and Kathy Clem,
talking about the importance of women supporting each other. And at that point,
I was a brand new mom and so my primary concern was lactation rooms, and how do
I do this whole mom doctor balance thing. I started to learn from the women
ahead of me how they’ve managed their career, some of them took me under their
wing, which was wonderful.

M Ranney: And then as I moved forward, I got to
start to take other folks under my wing, some of whom were only a couple years
behind me, but then obviously as the years have passed, there has been a larger
gap between me and the junior members of AWAEM. So it’s been a nice experience
in transmitting learned wisdom through the generations, and just sharing the
joint experience of being a woman in emergency medicine. It’s also been really
neat over the last few years in particular, to see how far we’ve come, from
where we were in those first meetings, nine and 10 years ago.

M Lin: Tell me a little bit more about
that, how AWAEM has evolved.

M Ranney: Early on, it was almost revolutionary to
just be talking about being a woman in emergency medicine. The mere fact that
we were meeting was crazy, and that we were talking about things that were
women’s issues was kind of crazy, I think, because for the generation ahead of
me, so much of their success was about being seen as being able to keep up with
the guys, being just as good if not better. So to kind of openly acknowledge
that was really a big deal.

M Ranney: And then watching as AWAEM has matured,
not only is it acceptable to talk about women’s issues, but we’ve matured into
a group that talks about a lot of other issues too, that talks about diversity
and inclusion in a thousand ways, and that talks about not just what do we do
to support our young moms, but what do we do to support our senior women, and
our women who are trans, and our women who don’t have kids, and our women with
disabilities, and how do we support our women who are researchers, and our
women who are educators, and as we’ve matured and grown, we’ve been able to
focus in on some of those populations that maybe were ignored, or not purposely
ignored, but just not so much of a focus at first, which is really neat.

M Lin: Yeah. So important. Tell me a
little bit perhaps about specific AWAEM initiatives and projects that may have
impacted your own career development.

M Ranney: Oh gosh, there are so many. I mean,
seriously, just the fact that AWAEM was there was huge. I cannot quantify the
impact of knowing that there’s a community of women who have my back, and who I
can go to with honesty, about whatever challenges I’m facing, and get honest
feedback. I remember having a lunch with Gail D’Onofrio, and talking about
raising kids, and her warning me about what was coming as my kids entered
school, and her telling me very explicitly, sign up to be a room mother, but
never bake the cupcakes yourself. It never would have crossed my mind. She’s
like, that way, your kids get to see you being present, you don’t have to slave
around in the kitchen, you can still go into your awesome career work, and be a
terrific mom, and kind of giving me tips on how to do that. And that, I don’t
know if it would’ve been possible without AWAEM.

M Ranney: So to me, it’s not a specific
initiative, but rather the larger entity of AWAEM that’s been so fruitful.

M Lin: How do you perceive that
leadership in women-focused professional organizations might be considered for
the purposes of academic advancement?

M Ranney: So I think 10 years ago, it was not
perceived as something that would advance your career. I think it was seen as
taking yourself apart as a women’s thing, as a way to advance when you couldn’t
advance along the traditional routes. I think that has changed. I think that
leadership in a woman-focused organization for a woman or a man, is now seen as
a huge strength and demonstration of leadership ability.

M Lin: How do you anticipate the
professional needs of women in academic emergency medicine will change in the
next 10 years?

M Ranney: How do I anticipate the professional
needs of women in academic emergency medicine will change in the next 10 years?
I think that some will be the same. I think with every generation, as you first
get out of residency, first get out of this purely merit-based advancement that
we all kind of thought we were part of, up through med school and residency and
maybe even fellowship, when we first confront the realities of gender inequity,
there will still be an important place for an organization like AWAEM to hold
those people close, and say, it’s okay, it’s not you, it’s the system, and then
to give them tools to combat the system.

M Ranney: I think that hopefully we will see a
rising proportion of emergency physicians who are women, and a rising
proportion of women in leadership positions in emergency medicine, hospitals
and academic medical centers. So I think that AWAEM’s role may not be as much
about showing people that it’s possible to have women in those positions, as
much as helping develop them into those positions in a much less, I don’t know
what the right word is … that it won’t be as unusual for that to happen.

M Ranney: I think that in the next 10 years, AWAEM
will have to continue to expand its focus on diversity and inclusion, and
intersectionality in every way, and I think that’s a really important thing for
the organization to do going forward. We’ve been good, but we can be better, we
all can be better, in recognizing all the ways in which we have implicit
biases.

M Ranney: And I think that AWAEM can also play a
big role in advocating for continued research on sex and gender in emergency
medicine, and on biases in every form.

M Lin: I’m going to pivot a little bit
to your career, but when did you first notice gender inequity to be an issue?

M Ranney: In retrospect, it had been there for a
very long time, but it really wasn’t until I was a mom that it became blatantly
apparent to me. There certainly had been sexual harassment in med school and residency,
some of which I called out, but to me, that was just, I didn’t identify that as
a systemic issue. It was really when I was a new mom and couldn’t figure out
how to make it all work together that I first felt the unfairness. That my guy
friends who had new babies were able to go back to working 50 and 60 hour
weeks, and I physically couldn’t.

M Lin: And how has your involvement in
AWAEM perhaps translated into greater gender equity in your own workplace?

M Ranney: I’m very lucky. I’m at Brown and our
chair for over a decade was Brian Zink, and he came in with a mission of
creating better equity. At the point when he came in, we had huge issues in my
residency, and in my department in general, around sexual harassment and gender
inequity. And Brian, the reason he got hired, was with the goal of facilitating
greater equity. I think at that point there were three women, maybe four, now
we’re almost 40% women. He put women in many positions of leadership across the
organization, and had an awareness of the issue.

M Ranney: And AWAEM was part of what helped push
him there. It was also of course the fact that I shared a faculty group with,
at that time, Esther Choo was there with me for eight years, I have Tracy
Madsen, I had Neha Raukar, I had Jess Smith, I had Laura McPeake, I had all
these amazing … Catherine Cummings, Libby Nestor, all of these amazing,
strong women who also helped push, but AWAEM gave us a bit of a framework by
which to do so.

M Lin: Really important. What career
accomplishment are you the most proud of?

M Ranney: Man, that’s really tough. So there are
two things. One is I’m super proud I have an R01. I’m like, really proud of
that.

M Lin: You should be, that’s huge.

M Ranney: Thank you, now I’ve got to get the
second, right? But I’m super proud, I think because especially as a woman, it
allows me to do cool science that I think is going to transform care, but it
allows me to sit at the table with more senior men and feel confident that I
can hold my own.

M Ranney: The other thing that I’m really, really proud of is starting AFFIRM, the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, which is a new 501(c)(3) that is aiming to privately fund firearm injury research. That, to me, I’m incredibly proud of because it has been a chance to overcome partisan divides. My co-founder is a gun owner, and our conversation, I hope, will change the national conversation about what we can do to stop the American epidemic of gun violence.

M Lin: That’s incredible, and definitely
things you should be so proud of.

M Ranney: And then of course, my kids and my
husband. I’m still married, and I still love my kids, so that’s good, too.

M Lin: Also important. What advice would
you give a younger version of yourself, or an AWAEM member at an earlier stage
of her career?

M Ranney: Two things. One is, I think, I was
actually talking about this at dinner last night, I think you should always say
yes, and I do subscribe to Judd Hollander’s view that you need to take things
on, because that’s how you develop skills and prove yourself and get known. But
I think that probably there are times where I could’ve been a little more
focused, and that it would’ve served me better.

M Ranney: I would also say to aim high. To not
say, well, I’m not good enough to do X. Say, I want to do X. The younger women,
there’s one woman who’s like, I want to be a hospital president. And I look at
her and I’m like, you are so cool for labeling that now, when you’re a few
years out of residency, because that means you’re going to get there. If you
wait until someone says, maybe you should be a hospital president someday,
you’re not going to get there. You have to identify that goal yourself, right,
so that’s the other thing I wish I’d earlier, was be much more intentional.

M Lin: Please name three other AWAEM
members we should interview, perhaps one around your career stage, one who’s
more junior, and one who’s more senior.

M Ranney: Okay. So most of the women I would name
around my career stage I imagine you’ve already interviewed, or have … so,
let’s say … Kinjal. She would be … I know you just interviewed Esther, so Kinjal.
Or Basmah, would be my two around my career stage. I also think Liz Samuels.
And then, someone more senior, again, I imagine you’ve interviewed Gail
D’onofrio.

M Lin: Great, those are wonderful
recommendations. Thank you so, so much for your time, Dr. Megan Ranney.

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